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Large Hadron Collider May Have Produced New Matter
Covalent writes "The Large Hadron Collider, the world's largest and most powerful particle accelerator and the 'Big Bang machine' that was used to discover what appears to be the long-sought Higgs boson particle (as announced July 4), may have another surprise up its sleeve this year: The LHC looks to have produced a new type of matter, according to a new analysis of particle collision data by scientists at MIT and Rice University. The new type of matter, which has yet to be verified, is theorized to be one of two possible forms: Either 'color-glass condensate' — a flattened nucleus transformed into a 'wall' of gluons, which are smaller binding subatomic particles, or it could be 'quark-gluon plasma,' a dense, soup or liquid-like collection of individual particles."
that matters.
No comments, as no one here actually knows anything on the subject. Soon to be FULL of comments, by people passing themselves off as actually being subject matter experts on the topic.
Nobody expects quark gluon plasma effects!
I know its just the heading, but the whole "new matter" vs "new TYPE of matter" is kind of an important distinction.
Not really. The current known elementary particles are all neatly arranged into the Standard Model. The one gap (Higgs boson) was recently filled. What we now need is to discover some process which shows the SM to be incomplete.
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And yet we never observed that kind of matter before?
People focus on the accelerator, but what really matters is the detector. And now that we have a nice detector, lets get a high beam current at a high enough energy to make something interesting to look at.
If you just want to look at high energy collisions, wait around for high energy cosmic rays. Individually some are much higher energy than any accelerator, but the equivalent of the "beam current" is ridiculous low, like two digit orders of magnitude lower.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang. As such, yes, this could be new matter that we haven't seen before anywhere else.
And that's why the LHC was and is every particle physicist's wet dream: they get to see and play with the conditions of the Big Bang. Nothing else does.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
There are two proposed explanations for the signal seen at CMS, and I'm not sure I would describe either as "new." The color glass condensate is basically a nucleus that is flattened into a pancake due to relativistic length contraction in the direction of motion at high energies. This flattening effect spawns large numbers of gluons (the particles that mediate the Strong nuclear force), wich in turn exposes all sorts of interesting effects. The quark-gluon plasma is a state presumed to exist shortly (say, 10 microseconds or less) after the Big Bang, when the universe's energy was packed into an extremely small volume. At high energies and small distances, quarks (the components of hadrons i.e. protons and neutrons) and gluons are thought to separate easily, creating a hot soup of strong force particles. As the QGP expands and cools, it eventually "freezes out" and you get a shower of normal matter particles. This, too, is thought to have happened after the big bang.
Both of these conditions have been observed at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in the USA. The CGC was reported in 2003/2004, and the QGP in 2010/2011. So while observing them at LHC is exciting, neither is really "new." LHC's luminosity is much higher than RHIC's, though, so one would expect to be able to study both conditions more readily...
Mendeleev didn't have Slashdot to waste free time that you could... er, *ahem*, HE DID use to make the table.
Our chief weapon is Quarks! And Gluons! Our two chief weapons are Quarks and Gluons! And Plasma! ...
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Yes, yes, yes, no.
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ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I think when scientists discuss a "new" X, it's generally understood to mean "newly observed" or "new to us". In this particular instance though, we don't even have to make those presumptions - because the claim is for a new type, which refers to our own arbitrary classification schemes. In this sense, it is indeed new, by necessity, because it is a classification we did not have before...
We know quite certainly that the standard model is incomplete both from quantum theory and cosmology: If one rejects fine tuning, something has to keep the Higgs mass from diverging due to Top loops. Above a few TeV, something has to keep vector boson scattering cross sections sane. Dark matter and dark energy have to be made of something.
Unfortunately, that it is incomplete is about all the hell we've got at this point. The LHC has basically been ruling proposed SUSY models out unceasingly, and if we're unlucky and New Physics lies past 14TeV, it will likely be a damn long time until we discover it because the LHC took up the theoretical physics budgets of nearly every nation that does theoretical physics for the better part of a decade to build, and they already had the tunnel. To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
In the worst-case scenario, there's nothing significantly new until one reaches strong-force unification, and that lies a trillion times beyond the LHC,
But i'm very happy with findings like these, if this gets us any closer to understanding the soup, maybe we can figure out
the math for what happens inside the event horizon of a black hole. That will be a revolution. (har)
So have you missed the 6-sigma confirmation news a couple of weeks after the initial (still un-confirmed) news?
Or did you choose to ignore them?
Why are physicists so eager to show the standard model to be lacking? Every few months now we see articles telling how better experiments are confirming the standard model and eliminating some of the alternatives. Just because the standard model isn't new or built on a spiffy new foundation like "string theory" doesn't mean we should want to kill it. In fact, some of those things probably don't deserve use of the term "theory" since they are more complex and haven't been experimentally confirmed in any way (except to the extent they match the simpler "standard model").
Because the standard model does not work for everything. It dose not work well with what we think we know about general relativity.
The assumption is that the universe does not in fact run on 2 differing sets of rules. So it follows that the standard model wile working very well for the things it works for is not in fact true. Even though we believe it to be false it still works really well so we use it.
The standard model though is not a true representation of how the universe really works. We would like to find that.
Why is it so hard to only have politicians for a few years, then have them go away?
It was a confirmation of a particle with a mass similar and decayments to what is expected for the Higgs. It's not confirmation of the Higgs.
There are still a lot of properties that must be measured before we call the Higgs "confirmed".
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I think it's been 'tentatively observed' & the scientific jury is still out. And 6-sigma, which only requires accuracy to within 0.000002% defects, is a far cry from proving anything about a particle that only exists for 10x22secs! I didn't know that the scientific method was now using manufacturing/business principles to prove anything btw ;-p.
Seriously. What could the matter be?
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
That's not true. There are collisions occurring in Earth's atmosphere that dwarf the energies explored by any colliders humans have built. The LHC has been designed for a maximum of 14 TeV. Cosmic rays can have over one million times more energy. That's one reason we're not concerned about the LHC creating a black hole that will swallow the Earth, because it would have happened naturally by now if that had a significant possibility of happening.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
To make significant advances with a successor hadron accelerator we'd be talking about building something at least several times larger and the obstacles are enormous... Staggering costs, the irradiation of the inner detectors, data processing, construction times stretching into multiple decades. Not to mention that the LHC consumed most of the world's supply of helium for years on end.
Well we'd best get started then. I can contribute $100 or so and will pick up some helium balloons from the party store. Anyone else in?
The conditions that the LHC can recreate are unique in that they are thought to have been present only during the Big Bang.
Actually really high energy cosmic rays recreate LHC collision energies everytime they hit a planet, star or any other material object. There are not very many of them but they can actually exceed LHC energies by quite a few orders of magnitude. Some large scale cosmic ray detectors get to study these but in nowhere near as much detail as we get to at the LHC but they do have some really cool detectors to play with such as a cubic kilometre of ice several kilometres under the south pole.
So to answer the OP the universe almost certainly does create this type of matter but on Earth only high up in the atmosphere perhaps only a few times per year per square kilometre which makes it impossible to find.
One of the smaller nuclear power plants for a sub might actually be quite efficient for a very large locomotive running on a much larger-than-standard track. At speed with radiator cooling you might manage some good efficiency. Tanker cars for coolant. Green as hell as as far as CO2 is concerned. You could move heavy freight. I bet in the fifties or sixties some serious thought went into big nuclear trains. Not feasible then with the reactors they had, but some of the N power plants in our ships are very compact now I believe. Albeit highly classified. What a poor analogy the poster made in his tirade against the sci fi fan.. Because, obvious security and political disadvantages aside, using a nuclear power plant in a big-ass steam locomotive may not be a half bad idea. Especially these days.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy